Photon HBT interferometry for non-central heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Currently, the only known way to obtain experimental information about the space-time structure of a heavy-ion collision is through 2-particle momentum correlations. Azimuthally sensitive HBT interferometry (Hanbury Brown-Twiss intensity interferometry) can complement elliptic flow measurements by constraining the spatial deformation of the source and its time evolution. Performing these measurements on photons allows us to access the fireball evolution at earlier times than with hadrons. Using ideal hydrodynamics to model the space-time evolution of the collision fireball, we explore theoretically various aspects of 2-photon intensity interferometry with transverse momenta up to 2 GeV, in particular the azimuthal angle dependence of the HBT radii in non-central collisions. We highlight the dual nature of thermal photon emission, in both central and non-central collisions, resulting from the superposition of QGP and hadron resonance gas photon production. This signature is present in both the thermal photon source function and the HBT radii extracted from Gaussian fits of the 2-photon correlation function.

18 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (13)

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• Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma
• Multiplicity scaling in ideal and viscous hydrodynamics
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• Initial condition for hydrodynamics, partonic free streaming, and the uniform description of soft observables at RHIC
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• Evolution of pion HBT radii from RHIC to LHC -- Predictions from ideal hydrodynamics
• Fitted HBT radii versus space-time variances in flow-dominated models
• Elliptic flow of thermal photons and dileptons
• Photons from nuclear collisions at RHIC energies

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Probing the evolution of heavy-ion collisions using direct photon interferometry
• Yoctosecond metrology through HBT correlations from a quark-gluon plasma
• Equation of state of strongly interacting matter: spectra for thermal particles and intensity correlation of thermal photons
• One-, two-, and three-dimensional photon femtoscopy
• Two Photon Correlation in Anisotropic Quark-gluon plasma (aQGP)